Rock Music in India : Part 1
Wanted to do a piece on rock music in India for some time. Might as well start off with this.
Much like everywhere else, rock music first find its place amongst alienated and disgruntled (yes, the favt. word of this blog) youth . In this case, the people from the Northeast.
When I was a strapping young lad during my undergrad days in Delhi, the biggest set of rock music fans were people from the northeastern states. If anything, if you were from the northeast, you had to be in with Pink Floyd, Metallica and black/death metal bands - that was considered the norm and anything else (like listening to Bollywood tunes) was an anomaly, an aberration.
And yes all of them strummed a guitar, even the birds. At that time I figured they were into rock music because the northeast was so far from Bollywood, and didn't have any representation in Bollywood, that they were in any case different and needed to find something to latch onto to create a common identity, and that 'something' was rock music and the entire rock culture.
But from the article that doesn't seem to be the case. They only want to be cool, thats all.
Much like everywhere else, rock music first find its place amongst alienated and disgruntled (yes, the favt. word of this blog) youth . In this case, the people from the Northeast.
When I was a strapping young lad during my undergrad days in Delhi, the biggest set of rock music fans were people from the northeastern states. If anything, if you were from the northeast, you had to be in with Pink Floyd, Metallica and black/death metal bands - that was considered the norm and anything else (like listening to Bollywood tunes) was an anomaly, an aberration.
And yes all of them strummed a guitar, even the birds. At that time I figured they were into rock music because the northeast was so far from Bollywood, and didn't have any representation in Bollywood, that they were in any case different and needed to find something to latch onto to create a common identity, and that 'something' was rock music and the entire rock culture.
But from the article that doesn't seem to be the case. They only want to be cool, thats all.
Actually, rock music has picked up in other parts of the country too. India has become a viable concert destination for a lot of international artists.
I feel that India leans more towards metal than rock and the desi-metal sub-culture has been chronicled in films (http://www.globalmetalfilm.com/03/GM_03.html) and magazines ( like Spin).